My 'neighborhood' in the Oregon Coastal Range has a population density of 14/sq. mi., and I know (and often hang out with) 10 of them personally (there's one family that's gone all the time, so we rarely get to see them. One of the "people" they count in that density is the local timber company, who owns logging lease property out behind mine). The nearest town to my house (20 miles away) has barely 2,000 souls in it.
Let's just say the population base is real small out here.
Now - you are absolutely correct that 25 people can turn an election out here. However, rural folk tend to be a lot more independent, and far less likely to be cowed into not voting. You should attend a school board and/or RFPD meeting sometime - we're *loud* and *proud* about our opinions, right or wrong. Given the secrecy of votes and the fact that all of our votes are mailed to the County Seat to be counted (welcome to Oregon), nobody in our little town has a clue as to who actually voted, and/or for what and whom they voted. You can infer it on rare occasion (e.g. Joe Candidate only got six votes, and he has five close adult relatives and a spouse), but you'll never know for sure.
Rural politics is a lot more personal than the city. No anonymity here - you can meet and talk with the candidate(s), and the candidate(s) spend most of their politicking face-to-face or through mailers. You won't see them in a televised debate (because it's hard to watch the local cable public access channel when everyone has satellite), TV ads are prohibitively expensive, and rarely will you hear 'em on the radio (unless there's a local AM station.) Winning the attention game (as you aptly put it) means the candidate (and every surrogate he has) often goes plodding from door-to-door, usually making his case in person, or at any local gathering (churches, the local Elks meeting, whatever). The local grapevines are also a very common means of spreading word about positions, ideology, etc (but you run the risk of playing the 'telephone game', as usual.) It's a far cry from the slick TV commercials and local TV news coverage/debates/etc that the city candidates get.
Oh, and one other thing - if the candidate is a bastard, everyone will know it long before he announces his candidacy. Half the town near my home knows me on a first-name basis, knows what I do for a living, knows my wife, knows which church I go to, has a very good idea of my income, my politics, etc etc. I also know who the prominent folks are, know which ones are worthless, and so does everyone else. This tends to keep the stereotypical 'local tinpot tyrants' at bay.
The Pill generally works for most women (and in some cases helps them stay 'regular'), a not-insubstantial number cannot go near the things without causing massive problems (irritability, fertility issues later down the road, etc). That said, it's fairly predictable, and you're not introducing anything more than just more hormones at the right times.
It's tougher with men, since we don't have predictable cycles to monkey with (sperm production is more or less constant until the guy is well past old age), unlike eggs (which are already present at birth), sperm is made on-demand, and various hormonal interdependencies with brain chemistry is likely way more complex.
Perhaps they could do something along the lines of making it a subscription-only service for the first year or two of a given article, then making it free (or at least ad-supported) after that?
A central processor, memory, data storage, and at least one external I/O interface (user, network, serial, whatever) combined, will make something a computer. A CPU by itself is just a CPU.
(and yes, a smartphone obviously qualifies as a computer)/pedant mode off
Mt. St. Helens is a long way off, and nothing near Seattle has gone off in what, 10,000+ years?
The Cascadia Subduction Zone goes off, and the tsunamis it'll generate will make nowhere on the West Coast (or Japan, China, etc) a very safe place to be.
He's likely counting developers who are not employees, but who write code for iOS and MacOS/OSX/whichever-this-week.
(That used to be a thing, but honestly, ever since carbon.h came out way back in the day, you could write an app with C++ at its core and something Qt-ish for the UI, then cross-compile the same code to Macs and 'doze with not much effort. Not really sure if something similar could be done between iOS/Android, but given that most apps are what, just glorified web frames...?)
There is no "search" option in a catalog. You had to manually flip through a bazillion pages looking for what you wanted....
Back before the days of search DB stacks and Index servers, paper catalogs (and even a lot of non-fiction books) had this thing in the back called an Index. It's that section of the book or catalog where every item was listed in alphabetic order, then listed the page number that contained that item's price and description (and maybe even a picture). If you couldn't find it directly from the index, you flipped to the right section (sporting goods, jewelry, whatever), started leafing through it, and if they sold it, odds are perfect that you found what you were looking for within that section.
Depending on the individual's level of literacy at the time, it took like a minute or two, tops.
Regards, An old fart who remembers having to find stuff without typing a word/phrase into a search box.;)
He did - granted, back in the day(TM, pat. pending), mail-order was literally the only way many folks could even get anything, let alone have that much variety to choose from. Sure, you could have the local general store do it for you, but you paid the markup, and odds were good that the store just used the same catalog to order the stuff.
BUT... timelines aside, it's the same mechanism, minus the Internet/computer bit, and with a slightly longer timeline.
Now pricing/monopoly-wise, a better analogy would be comparing Amazon to Bethlehem Steel or Standard Oil...
Unless Zuckerberg can alter the HTML standard (or iOS and Android), that's still an easy enough workaround - the first thing I do with a new smartphone is jettison and/or disable all things Facebook. If I have to access it on the phone afterwards, I'll do it with the mobile browser ("Request Desktop site", continue as normal, even for messaging - which they already try to block mobile browsers from using.)
I don't want to keep battery-sucking apps pinging out annoyance every couple of minutes on my phone (the apps I use for work do that already), so what makes FB think I want a device in my house that does the same thing?
Then again, I'm probably not their target demographic...
Jut the opposite for me... I live in the sticks, so places like Amazon, Newegg, etc have the selection that the (relatively) local stores do not. Prices are generally lower as well (even when you factor in shipping).
It's a tradeoff I know, but I'm okay with it given my locale.
That said, There's lots of specialty websites out there as well, and Amazon ain't the only game in town when it comes to online shopping (e.g. water well filters... kicks the crap out of Amazon's prices, which in turn easily beat the prices found at the local suppliers. Unlike Amazon, the specialty websites also know the products far better.)
Exactly this. I know too many colleagues who thought it would be mega-cool to work for Amazon, only to discover to their horror that they went to work for a giant, angry boiler-room with shit management.
I've lost count over how many direct and blatant job offers I've seen in my mailbox (via linkedin)... Unless I find myself unemployed, I just shitcan them without a word. I prefer my sanity, thanks much.
Actually, Amazon has been forced to collect sales taxes, even in states where it has no physical presence (at least as of April of this year). The only exceptions would be the five states e.g. Oregon) which do not charge sales tax.
Same here, which is why I stick to Credit Unions exclusively nowadays. The chances for error still exist (which can be corrected easily), but at least I don't get raped with a monthly fee, a convenience fee, a 'your balance went too low' fee, a 'you spent too much money in one go' fee, a 'you withdrew too much in spite of having more than enough money in the account' fee, or whatever the hell else they use to screw you over these days.
As a bonus, my CU actually reimburses me for any ATM fees that I get charged (I'm required to have Direct Deposit and use my card x times per month, but that's a given anyway.)
Not sure about your locale, but many smaller and independent businesses out here (in Oregon) do give discounts for cash (and sometimes for debit as well) - Alternately, others will readily charge a premium (usually a fixed amount, e.g. 40-50 cents or so) if you use plastic instead of cash.
This is especially true of gas stations (Arco comes to mind).
Even better - holding businesses captive to it, so that the big boys in this realm can slowly raise the transaction fees (not too quickly, lest their business customers not renew contracts, etc.)
Oh, I agree - there's a huge world of difference between where I'm at (50 miles outside of Portland, OR) and a remote fishing village in the midst of near-literally nowhere.
The point I was making to GP though was manifold: 1) not everything can be purchased via Amazon, and 2) it's not always the best solution for all situations.
Slashdot Mirror
What? You never know what or who may be relying on those occasional contrasting tones and words.
Well, as long as all the infrastructure and equipment needed to access the knowledge is still around, working, connected, and format-compatible...
selling t-shirts and coffee cups?
How about selling the VPN access itself. Anyone who trusts a freebie VPN provider is naïve at best, an idiot at worst.
Well, sort of. I'll explain:
My 'neighborhood' in the Oregon Coastal Range has a population density of 14/sq. mi., and I know (and often hang out with) 10 of them personally (there's one family that's gone all the time, so we rarely get to see them. One of the "people" they count in that density is the local timber company, who owns logging lease property out behind mine). The nearest town to my house (20 miles away) has barely 2,000 souls in it.
Let's just say the population base is real small out here.
Now - you are absolutely correct that 25 people can turn an election out here. However, rural folk tend to be a lot more independent, and far less likely to be cowed into not voting. You should attend a school board and/or RFPD meeting sometime - we're *loud* and *proud* about our opinions, right or wrong. Given the secrecy of votes and the fact that all of our votes are mailed to the County Seat to be counted (welcome to Oregon), nobody in our little town has a clue as to who actually voted, and/or for what and whom they voted. You can infer it on rare occasion (e.g. Joe Candidate only got six votes, and he has five close adult relatives and a spouse), but you'll never know for sure.
Rural politics is a lot more personal than the city. No anonymity here - you can meet and talk with the candidate(s), and the candidate(s) spend most of their politicking face-to-face or through mailers. You won't see them in a televised debate (because it's hard to watch the local cable public access channel when everyone has satellite), TV ads are prohibitively expensive, and rarely will you hear 'em on the radio (unless there's a local AM station.) Winning the attention game (as you aptly put it) means the candidate (and every surrogate he has) often goes plodding from door-to-door, usually making his case in person, or at any local gathering (churches, the local Elks meeting, whatever). The local grapevines are also a very common means of spreading word about positions, ideology, etc (but you run the risk of playing the 'telephone game', as usual.) It's a far cry from the slick TV commercials and local TV news coverage/debates/etc that the city candidates get.
Oh, and one other thing - if the candidate is a bastard, everyone will know it long before he announces his candidacy. Half the town near my home knows me on a first-name basis, knows what I do for a living, knows my wife, knows which church I go to, has a very good idea of my income, my politics, etc etc. I also know who the prominent folks are, know which ones are worthless, and so does everyone else. This tends to keep the stereotypical 'local tinpot tyrants' at bay.
The Pill generally works for most women (and in some cases helps them stay 'regular'), a not-insubstantial number cannot go near the things without causing massive problems (irritability, fertility issues later down the road, etc). That said, it's fairly predictable, and you're not introducing anything more than just more hormones at the right times.
It's tougher with men, since we don't have predictable cycles to monkey with (sperm production is more or less constant until the guy is well past old age), unlike eggs (which are already present at birth), sperm is made on-demand, and various hormonal interdependencies with brain chemistry is likely way more complex.
Perhaps they could do something along the lines of making it a subscription-only service for the first year or two of a given article, then making it free (or at least ad-supported) after that?
So who gets the invoice for the two bullets?
An abacus is not a computer, no matter how many Chinese - oh, wait... nevermind. Shit.
/pedant mode on
A central processor, memory, data storage, and at least one external I/O interface (user, network, serial, whatever) combined, will make something a computer. A CPU by itself is just a CPU.
(and yes, a smartphone obviously qualifies as a computer) /pedant mode off
...what's to stop said prankster from playing audio of a boat in the background?
Mt. St. Helens is a long way off, and nothing near Seattle has gone off in what, 10,000+ years?
The Cascadia Subduction Zone goes off, and the tsunamis it'll generate will make nowhere on the West Coast (or Japan, China, etc) a very safe place to be.
Seattle isn't far behind in terms all the down sides of Silicon Valley.
Rate things are going, neither is Portland. :/
He's likely counting developers who are not employees, but who write code for iOS and MacOS/OSX/whichever-this-week.
(That used to be a thing, but honestly, ever since carbon.h came out way back in the day, you could write an app with C++ at its core and something Qt-ish for the UI, then cross-compile the same code to Macs and 'doze with not much effort. Not really sure if something similar could be done between iOS/Android, but given that most apps are what, just glorified web frames...?)
Catalog sales were much less efficient.
There is no "search" option in a catalog. You had to manually flip through a bazillion pages looking for what you wanted....
Back before the days of search DB stacks and Index servers, paper catalogs (and even a lot of non-fiction books) had this thing in the back called an Index. It's that section of the book or catalog where every item was listed in alphabetic order, then listed the page number that contained that item's price and description (and maybe even a picture). If you couldn't find it directly from the index, you flipped to the right section (sporting goods, jewelry, whatever), started leafing through it, and if they sold it, odds are perfect that you found what you were looking for within that section.
Depending on the individual's level of literacy at the time, it took like a minute or two, tops.
Regards, ;)
An old fart who remembers having to find stuff without typing a word/phrase into a search box.
He did - granted, back in the day(TM, pat. pending), mail-order was literally the only way many folks could even get anything, let alone have that much variety to choose from. Sure, you could have the local general store do it for you, but you paid the markup, and odds were good that the store just used the same catalog to order the stuff.
BUT... timelines aside, it's the same mechanism, minus the Internet/computer bit, and with a slightly longer timeline.
Now pricing/monopoly-wise, a better analogy would be comparing Amazon to Bethlehem Steel or Standard Oil...
Unless Zuckerberg can alter the HTML standard (or iOS and Android), that's still an easy enough workaround - the first thing I do with a new smartphone is jettison and/or disable all things Facebook. If I have to access it on the phone afterwards, I'll do it with the mobile browser ("Request Desktop site", continue as normal, even for messaging - which they already try to block mobile browsers from using.)
I don't want to keep battery-sucking apps pinging out annoyance every couple of minutes on my phone (the apps I use for work do that already), so what makes FB think I want a device in my house that does the same thing?
Then again, I'm probably not their target demographic...
Jut the opposite for me... I live in the sticks, so places like Amazon, Newegg, etc have the selection that the (relatively) local stores do not. Prices are generally lower as well (even when you factor in shipping).
It's a tradeoff I know, but I'm okay with it given my locale.
That said, There's lots of specialty websites out there as well, and Amazon ain't the only game in town when it comes to online shopping (e.g. water well filters... kicks the crap out of Amazon's prices, which in turn easily beat the prices found at the local suppliers. Unlike Amazon, the specialty websites also know the products far better.)
Exactly this. I know too many colleagues who thought it would be mega-cool to work for Amazon, only to discover to their horror that they went to work for a giant, angry boiler-room with shit management.
I've lost count over how many direct and blatant job offers I've seen in my mailbox (via linkedin)... Unless I find myself unemployed, I just shitcan them without a word. I prefer my sanity, thanks much.
Actually, Amazon has been forced to collect sales taxes, even in states where it has no physical presence (at least as of April of this year). The only exceptions would be the five states e.g. Oregon) which do not charge sales tax.
Not for long, if this keeps up...
Well, they will until the security incidents get ugly enough.
Same here, which is why I stick to Credit Unions exclusively nowadays. The chances for error still exist (which can be corrected easily), but at least I don't get raped with a monthly fee, a convenience fee, a 'your balance went too low' fee, a 'you spent too much money in one go' fee, a 'you withdrew too much in spite of having more than enough money in the account' fee, or whatever the hell else they use to screw you over these days.
As a bonus, my CU actually reimburses me for any ATM fees that I get charged (I'm required to have Direct Deposit and use my card x times per month, but that's a given anyway.)
Not sure about your locale, but many smaller and independent businesses out here (in Oregon) do give discounts for cash (and sometimes for debit as well) - Alternately, others will readily charge a premium (usually a fixed amount, e.g. 40-50 cents or so) if you use plastic instead of cash.
This is especially true of gas stations (Arco comes to mind).
Even better - holding businesses captive to it, so that the big boys in this realm can slowly raise the transaction fees (not too quickly, lest their business customers not renew contracts, etc.)
Oh, I agree - there's a huge world of difference between where I'm at (50 miles outside of Portland, OR) and a remote fishing village in the midst of near-literally nowhere.
The point I was making to GP though was manifold: 1) not everything can be purchased via Amazon, and 2) it's not always the best solution for all situations.